


The Light on the Harbor

by Sholio



Category: Daredevil (TV), The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: Aftermath, Aftermath of Violence, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2019-10-02
Packaged: 2020-10-28 20:08:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20784371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Matt crosses a line. He thinks he can't come back. His friends think he's wrong.





	The Light on the Harbor

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alchemise](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alchemise/gifts).

Matt always knows Danny's footsteps: even now, even here. They're light and quick, and they bring a wash of Danny's dry warm scent -- a little spicy, a little sweaty, with a smoky undertone that Matt is pretty sure is _dragon._ And there's also a smell of food, crab rangoons and sweet-and-sour pork. Matt isn't hungry, but his stomach growls anyway.

He might have known if one of them found him, it was going to be Danny. At this point it wouldn't surprise Matt to find out that Danny has some kind of supernatural chi-tracking ability.

Danny drops to sit beside him on the rooftop, and doesn't say anything for a long while. At last he says, "There's a pretty sunset. Beautiful light on the buildings. You can see a little of the water from here too."

"I wouldn't know."

"Right. Sorry." Abashed, a little embarrassed. "Do you, um. Want something to eat? I had some ... leftovers."

The lie is so transparent that the corners of Matt's mouth turn up a little before he manages to straighten it out. "Not hungry," he says, just as his stomach growls again, giving the lie to the words.

"Yeah, okay, so ..." Soft rustling beside him. "I'll just ... leave it here, and you can eat if you want."

"I want to be alone, Danny."

"I know," Danny says. Matt often forgets, they all do, that Danny's naivety doesn't mean he's stupid or unperceptive. "But ... we're worried about you. If you want to talk --"

"I don't."

"Okay," Danny says, and he hesitates. "Can I sit with you for a while?"

"I want to be _alone."_

"Yeah, okay," Danny says. "But ... call if you want to. If you need to. Please." 

And then he's gone, and Matt is alone on a small ledge at the very top of one of the church's spires, as the sun slips below the rim of the world and it starts to get cold.

After a little while, he does eat. He really is hungry.

*

Jessica is the next one to find him, miles away from the church, on a different rooftop.

"Okay, I give up," he says as the smell of leather and soap and cheap bourbon clambers up and stops beside him. "How do you people keep finding me?"

"I'm a private eye, Murdock," she says. A flask is shoved into his hand, still warm from her skin. "I have professional skills. And I hate drinking alone."

"You love drinking alone."

"Okay, I'm also a liar. So sue me. But I'm learning to share my things."

He takes a slug before he can think better of it. He always forgets how _overwhelming_ alcohol can be, a raw searing burn, stinging his sinuses and scraping his throat. It's a kind of temporary pain that doesn't leave scars, and he appreciates that right now. He drinks down a few more swallows and gives the much lighter flask back to Jessica before he wants to.

She drinks, and hands it back to him for the last swallow. For a little while they sit together with the city's soundtrack playing in the background, the sirens and laughter and screams, the constant running background noise of other people's pain.

"You did the right thing, you know," she says at last.

"No I didn't." There's sudden anger, burning in his chest along with the whiskey. "If you know anything about me, you know I _can't_ \-- can't believe that. It's a step down a road I can't go down."

"Oh, so it's better to beat yourself up until the end of time for taking that asshole Fisk out of the city for good."

He draws a breath, lets it out. Another. Distantly he's aware that it's one of the calming and grounding techniques Stick taught him, a long time ago. It's that or burn bridges with Jessica, and he has few enough bridges left unburnt.

"I'm not anyone's jury and executioner," he says finally. "And the minute I cross the line into thinking of myself that way, then I'm as much of a danger to this city as Fisk was."

"I won't waste a single minute mourning him, Matt." Soft rustling and creaking of leather as she stands up. "You shouldn't either."

She doesn't say _But I would mourn YOU._ They aren't like that. But he can hear it between the lines, as if his super-acute hearing is able to listen on an entirely different plane, sometimes. He can still hear it after she jumps from fire escape to fire escape, back to the street below.

*

Luke is the one he goes to himself ... well, not entirely, but he's been sitting on the roof of Harlem's Paradise for a while when Luke eventually joins him. Soft steps for a big man, an eyewatering whiff of cologne, the smell of alcohol more expensive than Jessica's.

"Danny said you were up here," Luke says, sitting beside him.

"Tell me the truth, Luke," Matt says after a minute. "_Can_ he track people using chi?"

Luke snorts a soft laugh. "Brother, I'm not even gonna ask. Some things I don't want to know."

Matt smiles a little.

After a little while, Luke says, "Listen, I know about crossing lines. Crossed more than a few lately. What you did ... I get it, man. I've been there. Guilt complex and all."

"I murdered a man, Luke."

"You took out someone who was poisoning your city," Luke says quietly. "A man who tried to kill your friends, and kept trying, and was going to keep trying until he did it."

"That doesn't make it right." He forces out the words.

"No," Luke says. "It doesn't." 

And the breath goes out of Matt in something between a sigh and a sob. He hadn't realized how much it would matter to be _heard,_ to be _understood._ Danny and Jessica (and Karen and Foggy), with their willingness to absolve him of all wrong, aren't what he needs right now. Maybe later, when he's somehow come to terms with this in any way he can. But not right now.

Luke, though. Luke really does get it.

"How do you deal with ... all of it?" he asks after a moment. "The mistakes. The decisions. The ... lines. That you crossed."

"I don't," Luke says, and there's another soft chuckle, with no humor in it. "I just keep telling myself I'll do better tomorrow. That's all we can do. Keep moving forward. Always."

They sit there for a long while, and finally Luke stands up and there's some rustling, and then his coat, too big by far, drapes over Matt's shoulders, still warm from Luke's body heat. Matt hadn't realized until that moment how cold he was.

"You want to come down and have a drink, we're just closing up," Luke says. "In a little while, it'll just be friends down there. I'll leave the roof door unlocked."

And he leaves with those soft steps, the ones that don't seem to belong to a man his size at all.

*

_It'll just be friends down there._

Somehow, extra-sharp senses and all, Matt doesn't actually understand what Luke meant until he's already inside, in the upstairs hallway, with Luke's coat draped over his arm. He thought Luke just meant the club staff, night watchman, whoever sticks around after hours. He comes down intending to drop off the coat and go.

But in the hallway, he hears Danny's laugh and Jessica's low voice, and he thinks, _Shit._

It's not too late; he could just go. Back to the rooftops, to wherever the night (what's left of it) will take him, and hide him. He did that once, after all. After Midland Circle. He let the night hide him, let his friends think he was dead, let Danny and the rest of them protect his city for him.

_Keep moving forward._

He stands in the hallway for a long time, and then he goes forward, and opens the door to Luke's office.

One of the few good things about being blind is that he doesn't have to see the looks on their faces.

"Matt!" Danny says, sounding relieved and delighted and very, very young. And it occurs to Matt, in that sluggish way his brain has been churning up epiphanies lately, that he's probably not the only one thinking about Midland Circle right now.

"Change your mind about that drink?" Luke asks quietly, in his low rumble, and there's the sound of Jessica vacating a chair, and then moving things ... off a couch, he finds when he touches the wall and then the furniture to orient himself. He is vaguely aware of the layout of the club, but hasn't been in Luke's office before. It's an old, overstuffed couch that both feels and smells like it's been the recipient of more than one late night, and Matt sinks down onto it, his body folding up. 

He's cold and exhausted and tired and ... he never washed his hands, he thinks in sudden, sharp shame. He's still wearing the same clothes he was wearing two days ago. Black doesn't show blood much, but ... he has no idea what they're seeing now, under what are almost certainly better lights than the lights on the nighttime rooftops of the city.

It is slowly hitting him that he feels really, really awful. He's had half a carton of sweet-and-sour pork and a few slugs of Jessica's booze in the last two days, he's wearing the blood-stiff clothes that he _killed a guy in_, and he's cold to the bone and everything hurts and ... and he doesn't know why he came down here, he really doesn't.

He mainly stays on the couch because he's too tired to move, and not entirely sure he can get up without falling down.

After a minute, something settles over him: Luke's coat.

"You want anything, Matt?" Danny asks, in a voice that's uncharacteristically subdued, for him. "Food or ... a cup of water, maybe."

Matt just shakes his head, too tired to do anything else.

"Maybe get the man a glass of water anyway," Luke says, and there's a little flurry of movement as Danny leaves.

Matt is vaguely aware that Jessica is still standing above him -- she was the one who draped the coat, and she's still there, he can tell by her scent and the little rustles and other noises people make even when they're standing still. But she doesn't say anything, at least not to him; eventually she turns around and asks Luke, "Where'd my drink go?" Luke chuckles and there's a little bit of clinking; then Jessica sits on the floor beside the couch, with her back against it. Her hair brushes Matt's skin when she moves.

Danny's light steps come back and a glass clinks on a desktop somewhere in the room. "Is he asleep?" Danny asks quietly.

"Hope so," Luke says.

Jessica doesn't say anything, and Matt realizes she's close enough that she knows he's awake; even with ordinary human senses, she'll be able to hear the cadence of his breathing. But all she says is, "You ever catch that pants-stealing ninja down in Chinatown, Rand?"

"The what now," Luke says.

"Do we really have to bring that up?" Danny says.

"We always have to bring that up." There's an edge of laughter to Jessica's voice.

"How did you even find out about that?"

"Colleen told me."

"I might have known you guys talk."

"Okay, what's this all about," Luke wants to know.

"A ninja stole Danny's pants," Jessica says.

"A _who_ did _what."_

"Okay, first of all, we're talking about the Hand," Danny protests, "which means _ninja_ is completely the wrong word, and it wasn't -- I mean, she had a sword. _Two_ swords."

"She," Luke says, laughing. "Of course."

"She was really good with those swords!"

"Have you considered," Jessica says, "maybe hand-to-hand combat isn't that useful against swords."

"It absolutely _is,_ and I was doing _fine_ \--"

"Until she stole your pants."

"Is that a technique they're teaching the Hand now?" Luke says. "Because I think maybe I should spread the word to my guys."

"It was more like a crime of opportunity," Danny mumbles. "After she cut my, er. Belt."

"I want to know what she did with them," Luke says.

"I can actually answer that," Jessica says. "According to Colleen, she cut them up and mailed them back."

"_Mailed_ them."

"Well. Left them on the doorstep of the dojo."

Danny, being Danny, is laughing with the rest of them now. "It could've happened to any of you," he says. "Jessica, I've _seen_ you fall off rooftops."

"But at least I was still wearing my pants. Bartender," Jessica says, leaning forward, her hair whispering along Matt's hand. "Refill."

Matt knows it's all at leasts partly a show for his benefit, but it's something to hang onto, something to focus on rather than the crack of bone and pop of cartilage under his hands, the metal stink of blood, the vivid loop of visceral sense-memories that's been replaying ceaselessly in his head for the last two days. And ... maybe they don't really _understand_ (except Luke, a little), but they're _there_, and as they move on to talking about Jessica's bad luck with rooftops (over her protests), he lets it wash over him, waves rolling deeper and deeper, until he's carried away.


End file.
